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How psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD actually change the way people see the world

Psychedelic substances like LSD and psilocybin - the active
ingredient in magic mushrooms - are powerful, able to transform
the way that people who use them perceive the world.

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Because of that, after years of prohibition, psychiatric
researchers in the US are hoping to take advantage of that power
to transform mental health treatment.

And as the new documentary "A New Understanding: The
Science of Psilocybin" shows, the results we've seen so far
are powerful. Perhaps most interestingly, the film shows how
these substances transform the people who undergo this therapy.

The film follows the researchers and study participants that are
at the forefront of this modern era of psychedelic study. Cancer
patients facing distress about end of life talk about how their
experience helps them overcome that distress and accept their
condition. Healthy volunteers who took psilocybin for the first
time to help show that it can be used safely in a therapeutic
setting describe the way the "trip" changed their perception.

It's fascinating to see.

On a basic level, a part of the brain that seems to coordinate
mood and is very active in cases of depression seems to basically
quiet down for a time, allowing connections to form between
regions of the brain that rarely communicate with each other.
This mimics an effect seen in the minds of long term meditators.
Something in this experience seems to cause the "trippy" effects
of the drug, which participants in this research undergo while
listening to music and sitting with trained observers.

"In terms of whether these agents cause hallucinations, they're a
little bit misclassified, a hallucination is an experience in
some sensory phenomenon based on a stimuli that doesn't exist in
reality, it's internally generated," says Stephen Ross, an
associate professor of psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine, in
an interview in the film. "Versus an illusion would be looking at
the wall and the wall is melting, that would be an illusion, and
these drugs tend to cause more illusions than frank
hallucinations, they alter how we perceive real stimuli."

In order to cause these effects, these drugs activate serotonin
2a receptors, explains David Nichols, president and co-founder of
the Heffter Research Institute.

But something about this experience - the brain activation,
illusions, and hallucinations - seems to do something more
profound that's harder to understand. It's able to reliably cause
what researchers call a "mystical experience." That experience is
strongly linked with lasting effects.

"It was like you're at the top of a roller coaster and you're
about to go down and I remember inside myself saying, 'I'm taking
my mind with me, I don't know where I'm going but I'm taking my
mind with me' ... and I felt okay and off I went," says Sandy,
one of the healthy volunteers who tried psilocybin for the first
time, describing her experience.

People return from that journey changed.

"When we came back it was like someone had put on a light bulb
inside Annie's head, she was literally glowing," says the husband
of one terminally ill patient in one of these psilocybin studies
at UCLA. "I felt wonderful, I think it's an incredibly useful
tool ... what we did, it probably would have taken me years of
therapy," she agrees.